Approximately 20 minutes later, it noted: "We can confirm that a large number of instances in a single Availability Zone have lost power due to electrical storms in the area. We are actively working to restore power".

Although power was restored to the facility after a further nine minutes, it took a number of hours to recover impacted AWS instances and elastic block store (EBS) volumes.

It recovered approximately half the affected instances by 11.19pm (1.19pm Saturday AEST), and had everything operating normally again by 12.56pm US time the following day (2.56am Sunday July 1, AEST).

The outage impacted a number of popular social media services, including photo-sharing service Instagram, and Pinterest. The Instagram downtime is known to have impacted Australian users, and extended until well after Amazon reported full restoration of services.

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